
Elgin – Weightless / Still
Pixie Pace Records – 28 May 2021
There is not a sweeter sound of mournful melancholia I have heard this last twelve months than Elgin’s ‘Oh Love’, the opening track from their remarkable album ‘Weightless / Still’. It’s a glorious slab of suspended animation, suffused through with an aching intensity that imprints instantly, demanding repetition. I literally can’t get it out of my head.
Elgin are the next step on the journey of Dublin duo Anthony Furey and Paul Butler, at one time half of the acclaimed Irish Americana acolytes, The Young Folk, and marks a move into a more ambient alt-folk territory. If maintaining the melodic strength of the old band, here the shift is to a more ethereal sound, a blend of understated electronica and the earthily organic, where acoustic guitars and brass sit seamlessly alongside gently burbling sequencers and digital percussion.
For the curious, yes, Anthony Furey is related to the legendary Irish folk band The Fureys, George being his father and Finbar, Eddie and the late Paul his uncles.
Butler has no lesser a lineage that includes his great grandad, the nationalist playwright P. J. Bourke, his great-grandmother the opera singer Margaret Kearney Bourke (Margaret’s brother, Peadar Kearney, wrote the Irish national anthem). Also, his uncle was photographer and filmmaker Brendan Bourke. After receiving the rights to the short story Fishing the Sloe-Black River, as a gift from the author Colum McCann (it also inspires a song on this album), he went on to co-write and direct his first short film. It was the first Irish short to be shot in 35mm scope and went on to be the first Irish short film to receive a mainstream cinema release as well as enjoying considerable film festival success.
The album is way more than just a stellar opening track, the other eight songs carry similar weight, if slower to seed. Butler carries the keyboards, Furey the guitars, each sharing vocals. Both play and programme synthesizers. The lyrics of ‘Oh Love’ are a musing on loss, specifically of and inspired by Paul’s late uncle Brendan, asking quite where that palpable sense of love has gone, hoping, sensing, it hangs still there, in the wind. Deceptively simple, the chord structure and the electric piano are a template already to an aching heart, the vocals keening effectively, the electronic sounds subtle and complimentary, a shimmer in the hinterground, and the percussion breaking in at the halfway stage, finally, before a bubbling and repeated coda.
The following ‘Stone’s Throw’, is a lighter pairing of rippling piano and strummed guitar, almost a love song. This leads straight into ‘Cherry Picked’, the other lead track, and one that has caused much comment around the celebrated opening couplet, an ode to deprecation and low self-esteem: “You wanted a falcon, and I gave you a finch.” Another gorgeous melody, the words managing to say all it needs to in less than three and a half minutes, together with a lot left unsaid. The harmony between Butler and Furey is a delight, as is the entry of the brass, midway, a magisterial golden glow of aural texture, provided by Kevin Foran, who has worked with a variety of artists including Lisa Hannigan and Tony Allen.
A pulsing low-level throb introduces ‘Bulletproof’, which seems and sounds a song of break-up, an evocatively wistful vocal surrounded, increasingly, in echo and effects. By now, if the mood is becoming relentlessly desolate, strangely it doesn’t matter, the structure and the tunes are strong enough to cradle their perceived angst. Wishy-washy over-emoting this isn’t.
It’s true, ‘Apple Tree’ doesn’t break this mood a jot, but there seems, at last, some hope, the piano motif again cementing that feeling, as the instrumental build behind builds, a quiet storm of synthesised sound and drums.
I think this might have become too immersive at this stage, had the next song, ‘Hopeless Swimmer’ not lifted the mood, musically at least, electronic kick drums propelling forward the verses, ahead of a key change chorus that grabs for attention. As, indeed, does the somewhat shocking lyric, catching out any listener maybe concentrating more on the melody. It’s quite a kick and alongside the opener, is a terrific song.
‘Sloe’, inspired by Colum McCann’s short story which, as mentioned above, Paul’s late uncle made into a short film, portrays more relationship existential. It is buoyed by chiming piano, paired with a warming swathe of synthetic strings. A word must be given here for the part Scott Halliday has played here, both as producer, knitting it all together, as well as providing unobtrusive bass guitar throughout and some additional percussion and synthesizer. Chiming keyboards again greet ‘Halfway Down’, chorus pedal adding extra tone to the instrumental bridges, with more of Kevin Foran’s sympathetic brass, it’s essential leavening for the stark commentary on (any) religion.
All to quickly it is the final track, the bleak still-standing confidence of ‘Fault Lines’. Set within only a handful of notes, the song gradually adds layers, expanding slowly a stifling horizon, until a repeated musical phrase breaks in, rising up in the mix as all else falls away.
Weightless / Still is an accomplished and serious body of songs; an immersive and rewarding album that carries a deep thoughtfulness throughout. Butler and Furey are be congratulated for not only delivering an album that intelligently explores life’s highlights and setbacks but also for the shift in their musical style which empathetically underpins their songs. More, please.
Pre-Order via: https://smarturl.it/weightlessstill
Oh Love (Lyric Video)
Stone’s Throw featuring a beautifully choreographed dance from Aiobhinn O Dea “that portrays a search for stability.”